It is incorrect to say that the results of the presidential elections have already been decided and therefore they mean nothing for the country. Resolving contemporary Russia’s main problem—the formation of a new, free, and patriotic elite—will only be possible if Putin is “strong” after winning a convincing vote of electoral confidence.

Tatyana Gurova, Alexander Privalov, and Valeri Fadeyev

“Our achievements are great, but their basis is extremely weak and could collapse at any moment. We really need society and the elite to consolidate.” President Putin regaled the Federation Council with just this sort of sentiment last May. At the time, these words seemed little more than a pleasant pose. However, the illusion of Russia’s stability became obvious literally two weeks after this speech. The anti-oligarchy report, the Prosecutor General’s remarkably energy, the patriots’ total information war against the oligarchs, and the political émigrés’ counterattack on the Kremlin all came in the last six months as direct consequences of the president’s call for consolidation.
One might assume that the Kremlin has already won and consolidated everybody. There is an obedient pro-president majority in the Duma. Putin will have a more manageable means for passing necessary laws in his next term in office. However, this victory is a complete illusion. The new Duma may be pro-president, but whether the president will win a full-fledged popular vote of confidence in the next elections is not clear at all. The relatively low voter turnout for the Duma elections and the public’s apparent exhaustion from the pointless political song and dance makes it easy to think that Russians will simply ignore the elections. At the same time, the issue of supporting Putin, even when there are practically no other alternatives, has become incredibly important. Strangely enough, we, as a country, are still facing a whole variety of risks typical for such elections: authoritarianism versus democracy, fragmentation versus integration, and isolation versus openness to the world.
The YUKOS Affair and the extremely active prosecutor’s office have forced many entrepreneurs and other representatives of the business world to wonder if Putin is really their man and if he isn’t planning a return to state capitalism. Will he take away our property? Does he intend to set up a new dictatorship in Russia? Though Putin has often said that there is no going back to the past, the issue of the legitimacy of private property has been left hanging. No unambiguous answer has been given and many have decided to wait and see, to stay away from politics and not to vote.
The more dramatic the presidential campaign and the louder the Western media shouts about the “end of democracy” in Russia and “the rise of a new Russian imperialism,” the tougher the question gets: if we want to see Russia established in the world as an equal partner, if we want more than a authoritarian regime and want a manageable democracy, if we consider ourselves citizens, do we really have the right to stay away from the elections?
With all the risks that Putin has shown us over the last six months, we have to understand clearly whether we need a strong president who is capable of pushing through certain policies, or whether we can make do with a weak president who is forced to act as conditions allow. Especially when the chance that Putin will put the thumbscrews to business is very, very slim. The chance that with a “weak” Putin, we will lose many of the accomplishments of recent years and will live in a state of internal and external instability is very high.

Putin’s politics

How has Russia changed in the four years the current president has been in power? 
The first and most notable change has been economic growth. In 1999, no one thought about lasting growth. Everyone was licking the wounds caused by shock therapy, and the government’s main concern was the back wages in owed employees. After the devaluation in1998, everyone stopped dreaming about foreign capital coming to Russia, about the capitalization of Russian companies growing, or about a stronger national currency. Yet this is exactly what happened. The economic upswing has continued for more than four years. Real wages have grown by 10-15%. The Russian stock market became one of the most attractive in the world in 2003, and the overall capitalization of Russia’s companies has grown by several times over the last four years.
The pessimists says Russia’s economic growth is solely the product of high prices for oil and other natural resources that form the basis for Russian exports. This is not the case. Of course, good world market conditions support the economic upturn, but in the last two years growth has been determined to a large extent by investment in the economy, meaning that Russia has started to actually develop and not merely recoup after the capitalist revolution.
Putin has emphasized private entrepreneurial interests and a free economy. He has talked about this frequently, clearly, and deliberately. The very plans for how the economy should work chosen and constantly supported by Putin are without a doubt a crucial part of the current economic growth.
The second obvious element in Putin’s politics is the restoration of the state. He inherited from Yeltsin a weak government that was being torn in every direction by the oligarchs. The main media resource, television, was managed by political opportunists. Greedy governors paid no heed to interests of the country as a whole and dreamed of putting their own puppet president in the Kremlin. When Putin was still prime minister, one Western correspondent asked him a question which referred to “Kremlin oligarchs.” The future president replied, “There are no oligarchs in the Kremlin. It is the residence of the President of Russia, Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin, who was elected by the Russian people.” Putin was cunning. He acted everywhere at once. Sometimes, as when he took back power over the main television channels, he acted crudely. However, the well-known “equidistancing of the oligarchs” happened extremely rapidly, as if the people who were doing the “equidistancing” were not the ones who had recently reelected Yeltsin.
Putin introduced the federal district system, put his representatives over the governors, and forced them to obey federal law. He disbanded the governor-held Federation Council and took away the regional leaders’ right to consider themselves national politicians, reminding them to take care of their housing and public utility problems back home. 
Finally, there is Chechnya. Unafraid of starting a full-scale military operation against the separatists (and considering the catastrophic state of the Russian army, this was not an easy decision), Putin demonstrated that he would defend the country’s integrity by all means necessary. The battle with the governors and the second Chechen campaign put an end to the country’s feudal fragmentation. 
Thirdly, Russia is once again among the leading nations of the world. President Putin spoke of this task in every one of his annual addresses to the Federal Council. This is not merely a matter of prestige. This is a matter of the country’s very survival. Russia, with its huge territory and population, and its energetic and aggressive neighbors, has to be a strong country, or it will not be a country at all. In order to develop economic relations confidently under the current conditions of globalization, a country needs to be open. However, openness means vulnerability. Thus, we need to be on par with the strong in order to take part in dividing up the cake and to avoid becoming the cake ourselves, to put it cynically. 
Have we made any progress on this front during Putin’s presidency? Obviously we have. For almost all of the 1990s, Russia engaged in endless hustling in search of friendship and support from the US or Europe or Asia, proving itself extraordinary accommodating to the rest of the world under Kozyrev and extraordinarily aggressive under Primakov. Now, Russia has formed a clear and realistic foreign policy based on a good understanding of both its areas of interest and its resources.

The dangers of a “weak” president

At first glance, a “weak” Putin would not differ from a “strong” Putin. Yet without a convincing vote of confidence from the electorate, Putin will be forced to fight off opponents on all sides. Some will scream to the whole world that Putin’s authoritarianism has no public support. Other will say, “You see, Mr. Putin, you just can’t be nice to those people…” It will not be possible for Putin to brush all this off. It will not be possible because under such conditions Russia’s position will be weakened abroad and the risk of a rejection of democracy will increase dramatically at home.
We have been talking about Putin’s opponents, and not about opposition, on purpose. There is essentially no opposition. This is the main point of the anti-Putin propaganda sponsored directly or indirectly by Boris Berezovsky. No one would deny that Russia needs opposition badly. But building an opposition does not depend solely on the will of the leader, but also on other factors such as the presence of raw materials to build an opposition from.
The president has other, more dangerous opponents in our opinion, the “statists” who understand the state in an exclusively Soviet sense. This is the so-called security clique that has been operating quite widely and openly in the past few months. It’s no longer interesting to repeat the very modest success security and law enforcement officials have had in dealing with terrorism and with the criminal behavior in their own ranks. Nonetheless, they seem to have sincerely decided that their time has come and that they will decide the country’s issues.
Sergei Glazyev’s “new left” is really singing their song. If you ignore his carefully emphasized respect for the Russian Orthodox Church, Glazyev’s rhetoric is practically Soviet. The same demands for direct state intervention in the economy, the same evangelically talk of a magical, high-tech future…this will not lead to anything but the oppression of all organizations and industries capable of growth.
The danger of this so-called “security” wing is that without a “strong” Putin, it will be our only alternative. Lamenting that democracy isn’t working and insisting that Russia’s dalliance with the West only makes Western policy toward Russia tougher, these people will reduce to a minimum Russia’s abilities to respond to the challenges of the modern world using modern methods. In response to the challenge of new poverty, we will be pushed into the old Soviet mold of enforced economic equality. In response to the need for an economic breakthrough, we will see hopeless direct investment by the state. In response to the numerous international challenges growing more complex with each passing month, the security clique patriots will join London liberals in a touching call for isolationism. Isolation will mean collapse and ruin for Russia.
With a “weak” Putin, the much praised “Putin majority” will be permanently trapped in a bureaucratic swamp that will soon swallow up both the modern roads to development and the seeds of a responsible elite, as well as Putin himself.

Will a “strong” Putin save us?

Many expect that a “strong” Putin will reinforce authoritarian tendencies in the government. The events of last autumn serve as grounds for such wariness, but we believe that if there is a threat of increased authoritarianism, it is not lurking in the president. Yes, the former head of YUKOS is in jail. Yes, there is a pro-president bureaucrat party in the parliament. However, we should interpret this as part of a power struggle, which can often be cruel. Leaving aside the actual power struggle, we see that Putin and his new team are showing every intension to stay within the context of liberalism.
The president seems more liberal today in all issues of how to manage the country’s economy than many big capitalists and analysts who are insisting with increasing force on a strict industrial policy, where the government would practically tell entrepreneurs what to do. Putin himself at a recent meeting of the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs and Manufacturers stated that the government should be very careful with industrial policy and that state decisions should not replace private initiative.
There really is a danger, however, that authoritarianism could increase, but it stems not from the president but from a weak and passive elite. Today everyone who wants to stay in Russia, from bureaucrats to oligarchs, is prepared to follow the “party line” in the most Soviet of spirits. “If the president is correct, let’s expand his authority!”
If the party line has already been laid down, then it is merely as a rough scribble, particularly in regards to domestic issues. The most important domestic questions—how the federation will be structured, how to reform the security agencies, and how the government should be involved in the economy—have to be dealt with and consciously approved. This means that the elite should not be playing yes men but should be doing something qualitatively different. It needs to do the massive and mostly intellectual work that will lead to the emergence of an independent civil society and a realistic direction for development. In all four years of Putin’s administration, the policy of restoring the state was obvious. Though everyone spoke of a democratic government, the emphasis always fell on the second word. Today, the time has come to turn away from this emphasis and admit that we need real democrats to build a real democratic government, real democrats both inside and outside the state apparatus. Raising a new elite means, on one hand, drawing new people into government, especially those with experience as entrepreneurs on the free market, and on the other, forming non-governmental organizations and handing over some of the state’s power and resources.
The material for renewing the country’s leadership is already on hand. Over the last fifteen years a new social stratum formed, a group of independent people who either participated in the privatization of the 1990s or started everything from scratch. This group is consciously interested in having a Russia that is both strong and democratic. This contingent, and not the bureaucrats, could become Putin’s true supporters.

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